We Should Live - Ben Bateman

From The Daily Mail:

Meet the women who won’t have babies - because they’re not eco friendly

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.

He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity - “relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”.

. . .

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

These people are so intellectually fragile, I pity them. Just a few simple questions, taken seriously, would shatter their primitive little religion. And I don’t mean factual questions about whether the Earth is really in danger or whether those dangers are caused by mankind. You can’t think clearly about a religion without accepting its premises, arguendo.
So assuming that the planet is in dire peril and it’s all our fault, in this religion is the goal to actually save the planet, or is the goal to practice personal virtue by refusing to participate in its destruction? Those are very different goals that would dictate very different courses of action.

If the goal is to actually save the planet, then non-reproduction is a strange goal because it would reduce the number of people who share the faith and are committed to saving the planet.

Or perhaps the idea is that these women, by proudly proclaiming their commitment to non-reproduction, will inspire millions of others to do the same. Perhaps they hope to spawn a worldwide non-reproduction movement. But that doesn’t fit with the story, nor with the movement at large. When environmental zealots gain influence, their priority is to impose their will via government, not to persuade and draw in new followers.

Adoption is another way for a religion to survive despite a ban on reproduction. The Shakers used this strategy with some success for over 200 years, but it was hardly enough to build a movement strong enough to save the planet. At their zenith the Shakers numbered only about 6000, and now there are fewer than a dozen. Besides, the environmental fanatics don’t seem particularly interested in adoption. The subject comes up once in the Daily Mail article as an acceptable possibility, but there’s no evidence that our sterile heroine actually plans to do it. In this environmental religion, adoption is apparently something you can do if you really feel like it, but it’s not a serious group-survival strategy.

So I don’t think that the real point of this radical environmental religion is to actually save the planet. The point is a sense of self-righteousness, a sense of being one of the special people. And that’s not a bad thing in itself. Nearly every religion provides its followers with the comfort that they are the chosen people with the special knowledge.

Where radical environmentalism falls down as a religion is that it has no cosmology. It doesn’t explain what the point of being good is. In Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, the point of being good is to please God, and maybe get some advantage during life or after death. But since radical environmentalism doesn’t posit a God or afterlife, who is there to be pleased by the righteousness of its worshipers? If you’re a super-extra-special-good environmental fanatic like NoImpactMan, then what does any of that misery and effort get you beyond the similar psychic satisfaction that a rank-and-file believer derives from sorting his trash and watching Al Gore’s movie?

I see two answers, two alternate cosmologies than can fuel these believers.

First, it could be socialism, and I mean ’socialism’ in a very specific sense. Conservatives usually gloss over that word as a shorthand for any ideology that tends to grow government, but it has a very specific meaning and history. The etymologically curious should ask: What’s the ’social’ in ’socialism’? The answer is that the theoretical point of socialism isn’t actually to grow government for its own sake, but to give government enough power to radically reshape every level of society according to modern scientific thinking to create heaven on earth. Once upon a time people took that idea very seriously, and the big communist revolutions struggled mightily at the cost of millions of lives trying to achieve it. But it failed, and no one who knows much history can seriously argue that trying just a little harder for a little longer might have somehow created a new man for a new era of socialistic paradise.

Socialism has had its run as a major unacknowledged world religion, from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. No one really believes it any more, but they still find some comfort in reciting the old hymns, which is why you still read and hear little throwaway comments about how ‘the people’ are on the verge of rising up in violent revolution if the government doesn’t bow to socialist demands, or how we live in a Dickensian world of cold-hearted wealthy elites and downtrodden starving peasants. It’s all socialist malarkey that hasn’t changed significantly since the 1920s, just like the story about how the world would be a much, much better place if only we weren’t such bad people for not adequately celebrating diversity, being multiculturally sensitive, recycling our trash, supporting the revolution more vigorously, staying terrified of the myriad impending disasters, or whatever the crisis or sin du jour is. When the leaders promise utopia and it doesn’t appear, the blame will always fall on the followers, never on the leaders and certainly never on the religion itself.

So socialism can’t be fueling them, even if its language slips into their speech from time to time. I think that the modern environmental fanatics are fueled by something much more primitive and elemental. While the theological core of socialism was a belief in utopia on earth, core of this new religion seems to be hatred of humanity, including self-hatred. It’s a death cult: They want to die, and they want everyone else to die with them.

Fortunately, they aren’t violent about it. They’re content with death by sterility and severe government regulation. But death is still the point. Whatever the question, the answer is always fewer babies and a lower standard of living. It’s the common thread running through every aspect of their agenda, and it’s awfully hard to ignore in a newspaper article glorifying self-extinction.  So let’s call them what they are, and talk plainly about what they’re really advocating.